


Time After Time

by RetroactiveCon



Series: Hold Tight to What You Love [5]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Legends of Tomorrow Team are Family, M/M, Post-Oculus Leonard Snart, The Rogues (DCU) As Family, Trans Barry Allen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:55:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22054429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RetroactiveCon/pseuds/RetroactiveCon
Summary: Leonard thinks, perhaps, death is like dreaming.
Relationships: Barry Allen/Leonard Snart
Series: Hold Tight to What You Love [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1571482
Comments: 9
Kudos: 127





	Time After Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SophiaCatherine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophiaCatherine/gifts), [trinipedia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinipedia/gifts).



> Here's the Len-in-the-Oculus fic I promised! It was supposed to be ColdFlash-centric, but then Len's two massive found families decided they wanted to be there, so this happened instead.

Leonard thinks, perhaps, death is like dreaming. 

He dreams of a girl with dark brown curls running in a flash of blue. Of a tiny, delicate child standing transfixed by blurs of red and yellow. Of Lisa ( _his baby girl, always his baby girl_ ) sinking to the floor, numb with disbelief. Of his mother crooning bluesy songs from her bed to calm him. Of a wave of red descending on a lone scarlet figure. 

He sees Barry more than anyone else. Barry, wreathed in lightning; Barry, running past him as though on a loop; Barry, eyes focused directly ahead, images reflected in his eyes ( _the same images Leonard sees all the time_ ). Once, Barry gasps, “Len,” and Leonard feels for an electrifying second as though they could touch.

It takes, ironically, time for him to realize that he’s seeing Time. He feels so scattered, so spread thin, that it takes eons to form a single thought. He’s passive, helpless, 

“Part of the time stream.”

Leonard hears it and tries to turn his strange, temporal awareness to it. Images blur past him so fast he becomes nauseated, or would if he thought he was capable of feeling nausea. When they refocus, Barry is speaking to a massive group including most of the Legends, the Rogues, and Team Flash. 

“Barry.” Sara speaks gently. “Leonard died.”

“He died in an explosion of time!” Barry thrusts his hands down by his sides, frustrated and a tiny bit petulant. Leonard wishes, as much as he can wish, that he could catch those petulant hands in his and hold them one more time. “Time is a force, just like the Speed Force, and I don’t think it just kills, I think it…absorbs, almost. There has to be a way to get him back.”

The image starts to slide away. Time is moving on, never linear but always moving. Leonard tries to hold on, but he’s not strong enough. He slips away, hears Dr. Stein’s “Maybe from within…” fade to nothingness. It’s replaced by an image of a dark-haired man ( _himself, oh God he’s seeing himself_ ) being rent to pieces by a blue-white explosion. 

It might be minutes or millennia before he sees Barry again. His speedster is running, calling for him, begging. “Len! Len, I know you’re here, I saw you! I need you to come back to me!” 

Barry needs him. Leonard wants to reach out to him, to call for him, but he can’t even tell if he has a body, much less reach out in any meaningful way. 

“Len!” Barry sees him, Leonard realizes—his eyes are locked onto _something_ with fervent intensity. That doesn’t mean he can get to him, a point made even more obvious by the stuttering irregularity of his pace. He’s tired, losing speed (how long has it been since he took care of himself, Leonard wonders), and as Leonard watches, he drops out of the time stream. Leonard wants to watch him as he skids to a stop in the Pipeline, to reassure himself that Barry is able to eat and rest, but time slides away from him again. In Barry’s place, he watches Lisa curl into bed alone, bury her face in her pillow, and weep. 

He doesn’t know how long it takes Barry to try again—his concept of time is scattered as thin as his consciousness. All he knows is that the next time Barry runs into the time stream, something gives. Somewhere in the middle of his nebulous consciousness, there’s a feeling like a pull on a fishing line. After that, he’s only aware of pain: deep, burning, all-consuming pain that feels identical, and yet complementary to, the pain of the Oculus explosion. This isn’t the terrible wordless pain of atoms shearing apart—it’s the equally terrible, equally wordless pain of them coalescing into a whole. 

He regains consciousness in the Pipeline, a scream still lingering on his lips. Barry is kneeling beside him, rocking him and whispering soothing nothings against his temple. “Shh, you’re home, you’re home, you’re home. I’ve got you, you’re safe. You’re safe.”

Every touch burns like acid, but he’s so grateful to be back in Barry’s arms that he can’t possibly ask to be let go. He can only manage, in a too-weak, raspy voice, “I died.”

“And yet, you lived.” Cisco stands nearby, arms folded across his chest. He’s holding a thin sheet. Leonard doesn’t know why until he looks down and sees bare, scarred flesh. His body looks even worse to him after…how long?…of not having one. “Welcome to the club.” 

“Hurts,” he mumbles. 

Barry freezes. “I’m hurting you, aren’t I?” 

If Leonard tells the truth, he’ll lose the comfort of Barry’s embrace. Without it, he’s afraid he might slip back into the time stream. “N-no.” 

As close as they are, he has a perfect, millisecond-by-millisecond view of the pain that flits across Barry’s face. He hears the lie and understands the reason behind it, and he’s left with a choice: hold him and hurt him or let him go and take away his security. Leonard has put him in a truly impossible position. “I’m here,” he murmurs. It’s not a solution. “I’m here. Come on, let’s get you somewhere we can make sure you’re safe.” 

Agreeably, Leonard tries to stagger to his feet. He’s able to stand with Barry’s help, but the moment they start to move, the world starts to slip away from him. He has just enough energy to feel a twinge of panic before everything fades to black.

***

When Leonard wakes, Barry is dozing at his side. For a moment or a decade, Leonard studies him—the loose curl of his pretty hands, the fan of long lashes over too-pale cheeks, the slack gape of his mouth. He doesn’t dare try to reach out. He won’t be able to touch even if he tries, and there’s too much of a risk of time slipping away from him again.

“Barry.” Hearing his own voice surprises him. In the time stream, if he was able to speak, he couldn’t hear himself. “Barry.”

Barry is awake in an instant. “Len!” He bolts to Leonard’s side in a crackle of lightning. Against his will, Leonard flinches away. Even Barry’s familiar yellow lightning reminds him of the white-hot pain of the Oculus explosion. He won’t tell that to Barry, of course. “Oh, no, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have run at you. Hey, shh, I’m here. I’m right here.” 

He holds up a hand as though he’s going to touch Leonard’s face. Leonard braces himself for heartbreak ( _surely this is the moment time will slip away from him_ ). Instead, he feels a feather-light, radiantly warm brush of fingertips against his cheek. 

_“Oh.”_

He must sound heartbroken, because Barry enfolds him in a tight embrace. Leonard wraps his arms around Barry’s shoulders and clings. He’s real. This isn’t some trick of the time stream, isn’t something he’s passively observing. Barry is real, and he’s here, and Leonard can hold him again. 

“I’ve got you.” Barry brings a hand up to cradle the back of his head. His short, blunt nails scrape gently against Leonard’s scalp. The skin tingles, still raw and new, but there’s none of the bursting, breathtaking pain from when he came out of the time stream. “I knew I couldn’t give up on you. I knew we could get you back.” 

Leonard thinks of the things he saw in the time stream—Mick drinking himself into a stupor, Lisa sobbing into her pillow, Sara taking out her helpless anger on a training room dummy. “Scarlet, I need to see my teams—the Rogues, the Legends.”

Barry nods feverishly. “They’re all here in Central, they’ve been here since I told them I saw you in the time stream. They can be here in a couple of minutes, I’ll go call them.”

“No!” Leonard clutches at him. “No, it’s not…it’s not that urgent.” He can’t let go—if he does, he fears Barry could slip away from him again. 

“Okay,” Barry coos. He shifts in Leonard’s grip, turning just sideways enough that he can perch on the edge of the cot, reach a hand into his pocket, and pull out his phone. While Leonard clings to him, he dashes off a quick text; then he pockets the phone again. “Okay, Caitlin knows to tell everyone you’re awake. I don’t have to go anywhere.” 

Eventually, they shift so they’re both in the cot. It’s so small that they end up pressed almost nose-to-nose. Spooning would be more comfortable, but Leonard doesn’t want to lose sight of Barry’s face even for an instant. 

“How long was I gone?” he asks. 

“A month?” Barry chews on his lower lip. “Maybe closer to two? We all thought you’d died. I don’t know if…if anyone would have ever known you were alive if I hadn’t tried to travel back in time.”

“Back in time?” Leonard tucks his hand up under Barry’s shirt and draws idle patterns on his back. “What for?”

Barry ducks his head with a mutter of, “Nothing, it was stupid.” When Leonard raises a questioning eyebrow, he confesses, “Zoom killed my dad right in front of me. Just to hurt me. And once he was gone, once everyone was safe, I thought…”

“You could save him,” Leonard concludes. He’s not prepared for Barry’s slow, sorrowful headshake. “No?”

“I wanted to save my mom.” It’s barely a whisper. Leonard thinks of the tiny child, hair in a sleep-mussed ponytail, standing in the doorway as speedsters fought around a terrified woman.

“And I was enough to stop you?” 

Barry gives a weak laugh. “I knew it was wrong the moment I started running. I just didn’t let myself think about it until I saw you trapped in the time stream. After that, logic caught up with me.” 

Leonard doodles a lightning bolt in the small of Barry’s back. After a too-long pause, he murmurs, “I’m sorry about your father. I met him while I was inside—he was a decent man. He had your heart.” 

Barry perks up. He’ll consider it selfish to ask, of course, especially given Leonard’s piteous state. Rather than force him to ask, Leonard recounts as many stories of Henry Allen as he can recall, some of them refreshed by his time in the time stream. He’s still telling stories when the door opens and Lisa bursts into the room. 

“Easy!” Barry yelps before she pulls Leonard up and drags him into a hug. 

“Jerk!” she yells. “I thought you were dead!” 

Her hug is forceful enough to send jolts of pain through his still-tender skin. He focuses on not flinching. The last thing he wants to do is make her feel guilty. 

“If it’s any consolation, I thought I was too.” 

Within minutes of her arrival, the Rogues and the Legends trickle into the tiny medbay. There are so many of them that they have to form a line, which is done with a lot of shoving and snarling at each other. Mick, of course, shoulders his way to the front of the line, scoops Leonard out of bed, and holds him as though he can’t decide whether he wants to hug him, carry him out of STAR Labs, or give him a good hard shake. 

“Hey, Mick,” Leonard drawls, hoping to goad him into doing _something._ If that something hurts, he’s got no one to blame but himself. 

“Snart.” Mick says his name with more heat than usual, which is a feat. “What the hell were you thinkin’ in there? I was gonna have my revenge on those time bastards and I didn’t need you messin’ that up!” 

“Partners don’t let partners make the sacrifice play!” Leonard snaps. “You’ve saved my life more times than I can count, it was time for me to repay the favor!” 

Over Mick’s shoulder, he sees Axel’s eager face poke out of the line. They duck back behind Stein and murmur, not particularly quietly, “If they’re getting a divorce, I wanna go with Fire Dad.” Thankfully, Mick must hear, because a small, unwilling smile breaks through his fiery fury. 

“…Cute kids you found for us.” 

“You took me in,” Leonard replies, unabashed. “I’m paying it forward. I’m that kinda guy.” 

“Yeah, well.” Mick sets him tenderly back on the mattress and tries not to be too overt in the way he fusses with the blankets. “You do somethin’ stupid like that again, I’m leavin’ and I’m takin’ the kids.” 

After Mick, it’s Sara who steps to his side. Before she can speak, Leonard says, “You made the right call.” 

She tilts her head to one side, acknowledgment and disbelief twined into one motion. “Shouldn’t have had to. A better captain would have found a better way.”

Leonard lays his hand over his. “The best captains work with the situations they’re given. You kept everyone else safe. I made my own choice.”

“I better not hear from you for at least two weeks, you understand?” She affects her strictest tone. Leonard watches her mildly, pretending to listen. “No trouble, no heists, no sacrifice plays. Two weeks of _rest.”_

He sneaks a glance at Barry, who’s nodding emphatically. When their eyes meet, he offers what he hopes is a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Captain. I think Barry will keep me confined to bed.” For old time’s sake, he tries to infuse it with playful innuendo. It mostly comes out flat. 

“Now that I can’t help with.” Seemingly against her will, Sara smiles. “Be good, Leonard.” 

“Wherever—whenever—you’re headed, I trust you’ll be great.” For just a moment, Leonard leans his forehead against Sara’s shoulder in a lopsided benediction. Her hand cradles the back of his head just long enough to soothe. When he pulls away, both of them are more at ease. 

Behind Sara stands Ray Palmer, looking spectacularly ill-at-ease. He nonetheless clasps Leonard in an entirely unwanted hug. Leonard freezes. He’s all right with Sara and Mick touching him—he has given Ray no such permission. “Get off of me if you want to live.”

“Sorry.” Ray pulls back, clasps his hands in front of him, and bounces on the balls of his feet. It’s a bizarrely Barry-like move that makes Leonard wonder if he might have misjudged the kid. “You’re just, like, the grandad of saving my life. I thought I owed you a hug.”

Leonard arches an eyebrow. “The ‘grandad of saving your life’?” 

“Well, yeah,” Ray says with another bounce. “Because Mick saved me, and then you saved Mick, so…yeah.” When he puts it that way, Leonard can see his logic. That doesn’t make it any less absurd of a statement.

“Partners don’t let partners make the sacrifice play,” he repeats. Then, more softly, he says, “You did good, kid.”

Like Barry, the simple praise makes Ray light up. “Oh, okay,” he says happily. He turns to leave; then he whirls back and catches Leonard in a (thankfully short) second hug. “I’m glad you’re back safe.”

Leonard still feels bristly and off-balance from Ray’s hugs, so he’s thankful that neither Stein nor Jax makes any move to embrace him. Both of them express their relief that he’s alive; in return, he says, “I watched you in the time stream. Your molecular manipulation powers—I’m impressed.”

He’s concerned when Stein and Jax glance at each other in confusion. Jax says, “Okay, I’m used to being the dumb one. I’ll bite. What molecular manipulation powers?”

Whoops. Thankfully, Leonard is saved having to explain by Stein, who lays a gentle hand on Jax’s shoulder and says, “Powers yet to be discovered, it would seem. And Jefferson, I need hardly remind you that you are far from ‘the dumb one.’” 

“Like I said.” Leonard offers a reassuring grin. “You’ve got stuff to look forward to. Don’t dismiss your potential when you’ve barely gotten started.”

He hasn’t quite finished talking to the two of them when Axel leaps into his arms. After that, the careful formation of the line breaks, and he’s swarmed by Rogues. It’s a lot at once, almost too much, but he’s so glad to see them that he only stretches out his arms and tries to fit all of them into a hug. 

“We thought you were dead,” Axel murmurs. They burrow their face into the crook of Leonard’s neck. He rests his cheek against the top of their head and utters little hushing sounds. 

“It would take more than death to kill me,” he promises, mostly to make Axel laugh. 

“That’s not how that works.” Hartley’s fiercely proud expression belies his words. He doesn’t vie for space in Leonard’s arms; instead, he perches beside him on the cot and plays with Axel’s hair. 

“Never leave Lisa in charge again,” Sam begs. At his side, Roscoe nods so hard his hair flops loose from under his beanie. “She was an absolute terror.”

“Because _someone_ left without saying goodbye!” Lisa snarls. Leonard can’t defend himself against that. It was a selfish, cruel move not to tell her he was going, but he’d thought Rip would hold to his word and return them to the moment they left. 

“Don’t leave again,” Shawna murmurs. She’s standing in the doorway, unsure about asking for a hug. Later, when he’s well enough to return to the safe house, Leonard will spend some time catching up with her. “We need you.”

Afterward, Leonard can’t say what it is—a flash of memory of things yet to come, or the unrelenting crowd, or simply exhaustion—that makes everything become too much. He only knows that something shifts, and he stiffens and curls in on himself where previously he was pulling the Rogues close. Hartley notices first, prone as he is to panic attacks of his own. “Axel, get up. Back off, everyone. Out, go, out the door. That’s enough for right now.” 

Leonard loses track of the Rogues because of a terrible, hazy feeling like time slipping away. He needs an anchor point, something to hold on to. He doesn’t _want_ something to hold on to. He wants to breathe, and breathing is good, because he couldn’t breathe in the time stream and that means he is not, in fact, sliding back into the time stream…

“Len.” Barry doesn’t touch him, for which he’s grateful. Instead, he kneels beside the bed and coaxes, “Focus on something small. Focus on…on the blanket. If you were in the time stream, you couldn’t feel the blanket, could you?”

With an effort, Leonard seizes the blanket in both hands. He can still feel it. That’s a start. 

“Good,” Barry coaxes. “Keep holding it, and just breathe with me. Okay? In with me, out with me. Good. Just breathing with me.” 

Leonard doesn’t know how long it takes for him to get his breathing under control, only that by the time he does, the Rogues and the Legends are gone. He’s alone with Barry (well, sort of. Caitlin is lurking in the other room, trying to be discreet). 

“Thank you, Scarlet,” he murmurs. 

“I’m sorry.” Barry gets up and settles on the edge of the bed. He still tries to keep a respectful distance between them until Leonard pulls him close. “I should have known that was going to be a lot.”

“I needed to see them.” Leonard draws a bracelet of snowflakes around Barry’s wrist. Barry shudders periodically as the touch verges on ticklish, but he doesn’t ask him to stop. “I just want things to go back to the way they were before.”

“I don’t know if they will,” Barry murmurs. “I had…a thing happen, while you were gone. I’m still jumpy from it, and it wasn’t me dying or anything that bad. So I think you might need a while.” 

Leonard wants to know what this ‘thing’ was and how quickly he can track down the perpetrator. Then he realizes he saw it, briefly, in the time stream: a hand in the small of a back, a little scarlet figure falling helplessly. It had passed him in nanoseconds; he’d all but forgotten. “…How long is ‘a while’, Scarlet?” 

“However long you need.” 

They shift so that Barry is sitting propped against the pillows and Leonard is tucked between his legs, his back against Barry’s abdomen. Barry settles his arms low and tight across Leonard’s waist, a little like a seatbelt. Leonard chuckles to himself at that image. 

“Scarlet?” 

“Yeah?” Barry rubs his thumb across Leonard’s belly. It’s a motion he can see, proof that Barry remembers how he feels about having people behind him. 

“Don’t let me slip away.” 

Barry makes a soft, sorrowful noise and tightens his hold. Rather than feeling constricted, as he might once have, the firm grip allows Leonard to relax. “I won’t.”

Slowly, incrementally, Leonard drifts to sleep. When he wakes, he’s still secure in Barry’s arms.


End file.
